Just finished up editing the family portraits from the VA FEW Conference! The whole set up was pretty simple. Just a white cloth for a background, a single speedlite bouncing off a tiled ceiling, and a piano bench for folks to pose around. The fun part was in the arranging . . . getting everyone in each family to fit well together in a small space.

The editing had to be simple. A volunteer job with lots of photos to process and not the time to do it means one can’t spend all day editing them. Getting as close as possible in-camera is always the best place to start. Here’s a raw, unedited file:

How here’s the same shot with a few LR tweaks. Cropped, added a hair of contrast, and evened out the lighting with LR’s Gradient Tool. It’s easy to batch process these sort of tweaks across each family’s photo. Here’s the result:

The difficult part was fixing up the background in Photoshop. Removing shadows, adding extra backdrop at the bottom of the picture, and blurring out the backdrop wrinkles. With  three simple layers I was able to quickly come up with what had to be the final product:

And that’s how I quickly processed all 21 families portraits! If you know what edits to make and how to do it, you don’t need a lot of edits to make pictures look nice. Simple edits can go a long way.

If you happened to have attended the Conference, then you can now download your family portrait at www.lenspiration.photos/2016vafew!